8 incredible (and free) tools to meet your real estate design needs

Do you remember the Apple iPhone commercial from a few years ago, “There’s an app for that”? Well in the marketing and design world, that rings truer than ever. There’s usually an app, tool, or website that can help you out with any kind of visual design you might be working on, whether it’s a real estate flyer, web page, blog post image, or listing presentation. We’ve put together the 8 best free tools to meet your real estate design needs. Check them out:

Font Tools:

I’ll be the first to say that font pairing is not easy. I can’t even guess how many hours I’ve spent tweaking the fonts in a banner or graphic to make it look just right. TypeGenius helps take the guesswork out of font pairing by suggested accompanying fonts that look great with your starter font, and showing examples of how it will look on a web page.

This Safari and Chrome extension can identify what fonts you’re seeing on a web page, so the next time you see a sans-serif you need in your life, you won’t have to spend time looking for it. Once the extension is installed, just click in your browser toolbar to activate it, then hover over the font you’d like to identify.

The name and font family will appear like the screenshot above, so you can go download the font you need from your typography site of choice (Here are several to choose from.)

Graphic Design Tools

It’s been called “The easiest to use design program in the world” by The Webbys, and that just about sums up how incredible Canva is. You can add text to images, create collages, or even customize professional looking real estate flyers (Here’s a tutorial.) It’s simple to drag and drop text, filters, or shapes, and Canva’s built-in guidelines help you center and align everything for a professional looking graphic every time.

Consider using Canva to create shareable blog post headers. It’s what we use for our blog, and it only takes a few minutes. You can then use these images when you share your blog posts on social media, since posts with images are more likely to get engagement. You can even schedule out several different posts to the same blog content using our social media scheduler.

Pairing the right colors might be as difficult as pairing fonts. Luckily there’s a tool that can create a color palette for you based on the colors in an image. This can be a big help when creating a real estate flyer in Canva. Just upload the image you’d like to feature in your marketing to Pictaculous, and you’ll receive a palette of five colors that you can include in your design that will match perfectly.

You can then copy these color hex codes (those are the six digit tags underneath each color) over to Canva or Photoshop to use in your design as font or background colors. Here’s how to input a color hex code in Canva.

Photo Editors:

This site is the closest you’ll get to a free version of Photoshop. You can edit images by adding blur, changing colors and exposure, cropping, and more to get the perfect picture to use on your website or in other marketing campaigns. There’s even a desktop and mobile app available to edit photos on the go.

Though Fotor doesn’t have quite the variety of features that Pixlr does, it’s great for simple picture editing and collage creation. Like Pixlr, there’s also mobile apps and a Chrome extension available. If you have limited graphic design experience, you’ll likely feel more at home using Fotor than Pixlr. Their 1-tap enhance feature may be the most handy. If you snap a picture at an open house or of your clients who just closed on their home that just needs to be a little brighter, use this feature. It enhances saturation, contrast, and brightness for a vivid picture.

Stock Photography Sites:

If you need to drop a website screenshot into a phone, tablet, or computer screen (and want to do it for free) then Magic Mockups is your go-to. Their stock tech screens give you the dimensions your screenshot needs to be, then you can upload and export your image in a few seconds. You can even copy in a URL and Magic Mockups will capture that page’s screen and place it on your stock photo of choice.

If you have a lead capture tool for sellers like a free home valuation, you could show this on a laptop as an image for a Facebook ad targeting sellers. Click here for a video on creating Facebook ads for real estate.

This site pulls from dozens of free stock photography sites so you can view thousands of photos in one searchable interface. All of the images on Pexels fall under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means they’re all free to use, even in commercial marketing, with no attribution or backlink required. You can find high quality images of landscapes, city views, and even houses. Several Pipeline ROI customers have used these images on the homepage of their real estate website. They fit perfectly into any of our mobile-responsive themes.

Now that you know the tools you need to create awesome real estate visuals, you need to know how to implement them into a complete inbound marketing strategy. We’ve put together the best real estate marketing tips to help you out. Download the Best of 2015 bundle now – just click the button below.